The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature (review)

McCracken, Peggy. The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Pp. xiii + 224.

Medieval romance has traditionally been understood by literary critics as the narrative expression of utopian longings, and therefore as an attempt to escape history through strategies of idealization. Indeed, romance plots typically move from the articulation of a desire, lack, or defect toward an end-point of fulfillment, completion, or perfection. To give merely the most famous examples, Arthur, the once and future king, is in some sense removed from time altogether, especially in that his prophesied return from Avalon is perpetually deferred; Camelot is a place of immaculate beauty and pure social cohesion, even under the threat of attack from the outside; and the Round Table figures a continuity without beginning or end and a community without dissent. However, while romance may be fundamentally escapist in nature, it is clear that it is never actually divorced from the social, political, and historical matrices in which it was produced—and, for that matter, in which it continues to be consumed. Writing in 1945, Erich Auerbach describes romance as eschewing a "penetrating view of contemporary reality," but nonetheless using its fantastic imaginary in order to produce a "class ethics which as such claimed and indeed attained acceptance and validity in this real and earthly world" (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton, 1963, 136-37). In other words, while romance may not seek to imitate the reality of its feudal audience, it nonetheless serves as a ritual of community formation that pertains directly to how the actual nobility was organized and hierarchized. According to Auerbach, romance not only represents an absolute, utopian community, "raised above all earthly contingencies," but it also "gives those who submit to its dictates the feeling that they belong to a community of the elect, a circle of solidarity . . . set apart from the common herd" (ibid.). Romance signifies its historical and ideological embeddedness primarily through these gestures of transcendence and exclusion—gestures that serve to shape the ethics and politics of feudal audiences. As an ideological structure, romance is not an evasion of history, but rather a mediation of historical forces that generates meaning within the parameters of specific political forces.

Recent trends in criticism have sought to historicize romance by placing its imaginary projections into an ideological frame, and by offering a reading of romance as a strategy for normalizing, idealizing, or even disavowing the set of social inequities or antagonisms that is constitutive of social and political power in the later feudal period. Critics like Christopher Baswell, Simon Gaunt, and Geraldine Heng have argued, for instance, that romance offers a space for late feudal culture to explore, and even thematize, oppositional forces that it imagines to be capable of subverting or destroying political and social hierarchies. Through strategies of narrative containment and closure, opposition is ultimately short-circuited or co-opted by a dominant political fiction. Beyond class conflict, oppositional forces include any sort of threat to a vertical, patrilineal social organization, especially gender insubordination and sexual misconduct. Feminists like E. Jane Burns and Roberta Krueger have suggested that medieval romance typically betrays anxiety over the possibility that women (whose social power is strictly limited in the patriarchal regime of late feudalism) might respond to their representation in courtly texts, or that women present in the court might stand as mute figures of dissent to a male-centered discourse in which they are construed solely as signifiers of desirability, rather than as producers of signs. Romance allows women to speak and to desire, but typically only so that the narrative can eventually undermine women's resistance through the reinforcement of a code of feudal allegiance and civil order.

Peggy McCracken's masterful new study of queenship and sexual transgression in twelfth- and thirteenth-century romance is both a highly significant contribution to...